Australia welcomes the biggest private museum in the southern hemisphere

TASMANIA'S Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), housed in an underground building hewn from a sandstone cliff, is as surprising as the man behind it. David Walsh, a mathematical savant and university dropout, is a professional gambler, part of a syndicate that bets around $1 billion a year using complex computer-gaming systems he helped to create.

Mr Walsh has poured his winnings into Moorilla, an estate on the River Derwent, 12km north of the Tasmanian capital, Hobart, which includes a vineyard, microbrewery and restaurant. Since January 21st, it also has a new museum, with 6,000 square metres of exhibition space spread over three floors, to show Mr Walsh's collection of antiquities, Australian modernist painters, and international contemporary art. Entry is free.

“The museum is my soapbox and I've got one hell of a megaphone,” says Mr Walsh who refers to MONA as a “subversive Disneyland”. MONA is part Tate Modern, part theme park, a showcase that uses art to explore the human condition. There are works that examine bodily functions. One, entitled “Cloaca Professional” (pictured), by a Belgian artist, Wim Delvoye, mimics the human digestive system: it is fed by curators and produces excrement every day at 3pm. Another, “Locus Focus”, by an Austrian collective, Gelitin, is an unmarked toilet in a row of cubicles which uses mirrors to give you a close-up view of your body in action. There is also a sex-and-death gallery with the mutilated body of a Palestinian suicide-bomber sculpted in chocolate and a replica of a medically assisted suicide-machine. The display is typical. As Tasmania considers the legalisation of euthanasia, Mr Walsh tackles the subject head on.

But he is not always, or not only, provocative. The centrepiece of the show is “Snake”, an iconic piece by Australia's best-known modernist, Sidney Nolan, which has hardly been displayed since it was created in 1971. Composed of 1,620 individual panels, it is shown on a 45-metre curved wall built specially for the work.

Unlike traditional displays, the art is not placed chronologically. Egyptian mummies, for example, are shown near Chris Ofili's controversial “Holy Virgin Mary”, a canvas decorated with elephant dung, that was part of Charles Saatchi's “Sensation” exhibition. There are no wall labels; instead visitors are given iPods with information on the artworks.

What this amounts to is a monumental cabinet of curiosities reflecting the interests of one man. “MONA is David's life,” says Mark Fraser, director of Mr Walsh's art operations. He's not kidding. Mr Walsh has a flat concealed inside the museum (a window in his floor lets him look down on the Nolan gallery). He has also placed his father's ashes in the gallery's spectacular atrium. Although Mr Walsh says he hopes MONA will be controversial, judging by the early visitors, so far Tasmanians are more delighted than outraged.